Szmul Mordekhai Zygielbojm

Last Update 21 April 2006

Zygielbojm

As one of 10 children, Szmul Mordekhai Zygielbojm was born on 21 February 1895
in the village of Borowice. In 1899 his family moved to
Krasnystaw, where he endured an upbringing of hardship and privation. The family’s
circumstances were such that at the age of 10 he was forced to leave school and began working in a factory
manufacturing boxes. In 1907, aged 12, Zygielbojm moved to
Warsaw, working at various trades. On the outbreak of the WW1, he came back to
Krasnystaw and, with his family, moved to
Chelm. It was at that time he began his communal activities.

Now aged 20, Zygielbojm dedicated himself wholeheartedly to the flourishing Jewish workers' movement.
In December 1917, the first convention of the Bundist movement in
Poland took place in Lublin and Zygielbojm attended as a delegate. He met the most
important leaders of the movement at the convention, which resulted in a radical change in his life. The
Bund leaders were impressed by Zygielbojm, and in 1920
with the establishment of an independent Poland, he was summoned back to
Warsaw. He was appointed as secretary to the Professional Union of Jewish Metal
Workers and a member of the Warsaw Committee of the Bund. From that moment
his star was on the rise. In 1924, Zygielbojm was elected to the
Central Committee of the Bund, and remained a member until the end of his life. At the same time
he was appointed secretary of the Central Council of Jewish Trade Unions. From
1930 he also edited Arbeiter Fragen (Worker’s Issues),
the trades unions’ journal. A good speaker and writer, he was both well-liked and greatly admired by the
Jewish workers of Warsaw. In 1936 Zygielbojm
was sent by the Central Committee in Warsaw to become the leader of
the Jewish workers'movement in Lodz, and in 1938
he was elected to the Lodz city council.

On the outbreak of WW2, Zygielbojm hurried back to Warsaw,
where he became a member of the defense committee that functioned at the time of the siege
and defense of the capital, as well as editor of the Folkszeitung (People's Newspaper).

At the beginning of the occupation the Germans demanded 12 representatives of the population to be
kept as hostages; they would be held responsible for the maintenance of order in the city. The City
President, Stefan Starzynski, proposed that the Jewish worker
population provide one of the hostages and that this should be
Ester Ivinska. Zygielbojm was totally opposed to a woman being held as a hostage
and instead suggested himself as a candidate. Thus Zygielbojm became one of two Jewish hostages
(the other was
Abraham Gepner). On his release Zygielbojm was among the group of Bund
members who organized an underground centre of the party. In addition, yet another function was
imposed upon on him; he represented the Bund in the new WarsawJudenrat.

One of the earliest functions of the Judenrat was to deal with the German order to create
a ghetto. On 4 November 1939, the Germans demanded
that the Jews carry this out within three days. In the ensuing debate, Zygielbojm strenuously opposed the idea.
When a majority decision of the Judenrat resulted in a motion to carry out the decree, on the basis that
not to do so would only result in greater hardships for the Jewish population, (“Nazi soldiers will turn up at
Jewish homes and evict the Jews from their apartments by force. What will they do to our women and
children?”), Zygielbojm declared:
“A historic decision has taken place here. I was, it seems, too weak to
communicate that we must not do this. I feel, however, that I do not have enough moral strength to be
able to take part in this. I feel that I would not have the right to continue living if the ghetto is carried through
and my conscience does not remain clear. I declare, therefore, that I resign my appointment. I
know that it will be the duty of the chairman to report my resignation to the Gestapo at once
and I consider the consequences that this will have for me personally. I can, however, not act differently.”

Subsequently Zygielbojm spoke to an audience of assembled Jews who, having learned of the decree
concerning the formation of the ghetto, came to the building of the Judenrat. He called on the Jews
not to go voluntarily to the ghetto, not to lose courage and to remain in their homes until they were removed
by force. His declaration at the meeting of the Judenrat and his opposition to the forming of
a ghetto, rapidly came to the attention of the Germans. Zygielbojm was ordered to attend the Gestapo
in order to discuss important matters. What the order meant was clear. He did not report to the Gestapo,
hiding himself instead. The underground committee of the Bund decided that he must escape from
Poland. In particular, a vital mission became ancillary to his escape – to present to the world details
of the atrocities that the Nazis were perpetrating on the Jewish population. And so, at the end of
December 1939, Zygielbojm left Poland, and travelling through Germany
and Holland with a false Dutch passport, reached Belgium. There, before a Socialist International meeting in
Brussels, he described the persecution of the Jews during the early
stages of the Nazi occupation of Poland. His report had a tremendous impact. For the first time, the world
heard an authentic description of the German atrocities.

With the fall of Belgium, Zygielbojm fled to France, and in September 1940
he left there for the United States. He travelled around that country, helping to arouse the awareness
of the American public to the barbarous nature of the Nazi regime in Poland. In
March 1942, he was sent to London
as the representative of Polish Jewry in the National Council of the Polish government–in–exile, a position
he was to hold for the next year. Zygielbojm never abandoned the anti-Zionist hard line of his party, and in
meetings of the National Council, accentuated his belief in a just and non-discriminatory Poland in which the
evil of anti-Semitism would be eradicated. But as more and more reports came to him from the Jewish
underground about the annihilation of the Jews of Poland, Zygielbojm concentrated instead on informing the
world of what was happening there.
Working tirelessly, he organized aid for the oppressed Jews, and assisted by the Polish government–in– exile,
appealed to public opinion, and the Socialist movement in particular, to provide support and an
effective means of rescue.

In May 1942, a report reached Zygielbojm from the Bund in
Warsaw concerning the annihilation of Polish Jews. This report was
one of the first to provide
details of the nature and scale of the slaughter. It contained a list of places where Aktionen
had occurred, identified the sites of extermination camps and provided an estimate of the number of Jews
who had by then been murdered – some 700,000. Zygielbojm strove constantly to bring the plight of the
Jews to the attention of the public and to appeal to world opinion. In a BBC broadcast on
2 June 1942, he spoke of
“the Jews in the ghettos who day-by-day see their relatives dragged
away en masse to their death, knowing only too well that their own turn will come.”

Addressing a meeting of the British Labour party, Zygielbojm described the Jewish predicament:
“Today, you have heard the frightening news from Poland; these are
facts that make blood curdle in the veins. I have in my hand an excerpt from a letter that a Jewish
woman in one ghetto wrote to her sister in another ghetto in Poland. The letter is a shocking
call to the world. The woman writes:
`My hand shakes. I cannot write, our minutes are numbered; only God knows if we will see each other again.
I write and I cry; my children lament. They want so much to live… We all say goodbye to you.'."
Zygielbojm continued:
“This is the atmosphere in which the Jews live in the ghettos of Poland.
Try to imagine the people who see their nearest being dragged away to their death every day and each
one knows that their turn must come. Imagine the thousands of Jewish mothers, the mothers
who look at their children and know that their death is inevitable … Imagine the great crime of
methodically massacring an entire people. Each of us who understands the cruelty of the crime must
be shocked by the feeling of shame that we find ourselves among the living, to belong to the human
genus, if means are not found to stop the greatest crime in human history. The conscience of every
person must be shaken; the serenity of those who ignore the facts must be exploded …
Each of us who does not do everything possible to stop the mass slaughter will take upon themselves
moral co-responsibility for the dead. In the name of the hopeless innocent people sentenced to death in the
ghettos of Poland, whose hands stretched out to the world unseen, I call on all people, to all nations
whose conscience is still weak, to erase the burning shame that is directed at the human race -
force the Nazi murderers to stop the systematic massacre of a people!”

Zygielbojm drafted a resolution of the National Council containing three proposals
1) The National Council demands of the government that it ask all of the Allied nations, particularly
America and England, to immediately devise a plan of special acts against Germany that will force
an end to the slaughter of Jews.
2) The dropping of precise descriptions of the slaughter of Jews in the German language in large
numbers from airplanes over Germany.
3) The government should take steps for a special conference of all of the Allied governments
to be called quickly to publish an uncompromising protest and a powerful warning in the name
of all the fighting nations to the German people and their government.

He had already drafted proposals concerning the undertaking of sanctions against Germany on two
earlier occasions, which he had submitted to Churchill and
Roosevelt. The responses were diplomatically evasive. Now he sent the
President and the Prime Minister a final appeal:
“As the plenipotentiary representative of the Jewish workers'
movement in Poland and in the name of the Jews who are being murdered in vast numbers behind the
gates of the ghetto, I turn to your governments with this last desperate appeal. Here is an
excerpt from the last report that has again come from Warsaw:
`A fierce storm is raging on the heads of Polish Jewry and the terrible storm gets stronger with
each day. The entire Jewish population is being exterminated, the men, the women and the children.
Of the three and a half million Jews from before the war, there now remain alive no more than a
few thousand and the mass murder continues further. The surviving Jews in Poland beg you to find
the means to save the remnant of Polish Jews who remain alive.’
As a man who represents the unfortunate Jewish population of Poland, I give you their last appeal for rescue.”

On 2 December 1942, Jan Karski,
a courier from the Polish underground to the government in exile, met with Zygielbojm in
London. Apart from eye-witness testimony about the extermination
of the Jews, Karski brought with him a message from
Leon Feiner, a member of the Bund:
“ … We here feel hate for those who were saved there because
they are not saving us … They are not doing enough. We know that there, in the humane and free world,
it is absolutely impossible to believe what is happening to us here. Let them do something that will
force the world to believe … We are all dying; they will also die there. Let them lay siege to
Churchill's government and others, proclaim a
hunger strike, let them even die of hunger rather than budge until they believe and take measures to
save the last remnants who are still alive. We know that no political action, no protests or proclamations
of punishment after the war will help. None of these make any impression on the Germans …”

Zygielbojm was distraught on hearing Karski’s evidence and
Feiner’s message. Despite his anguished appeals for action to save at least a
fragment of Polish Jewry, Zygielbojm became haunted by his inability to communicate the true nature of the
disaster in influential circles. For the next five months he continued his desperate efforts, even as news
emerged of the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
and the ghetto’s destruction. Finally, upon learning
of the death of his wife and son in Warsaw,
Zygielbojm decided to heed Feiner’s call for
an act of self-sacrificing protest. On 12 May 1943,
he committed suicide in London, leaving letters addressed to the
president of the Polish republic, Wladyslaw Rackiewicz,
and the prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile,
Wladyslaw Sikorski, which included these words:
"I know how little a human life is worth today. However, while I could
not do anything during my life, perhaps with my death I will help to break the indifference of they who
have the ability to save now, perhaps at the last moment, the still living Polish Jews.
My life belongs to the Jewish people in Poland and, therefore, I give it to them.”

A post-war biography of Zygielbojm was entitled "Faithful unto Death". Few have been deserving
of a more appropriate epitaph.